How Humana Turned Automation Into Measurable Results 

Melinda, I’m going to go ahead and hand it off to you to talk through Humana’s journey. Sounds great. Thanks, Lizzie. So good morning, everyone. As I mentioned earlier, my name is Melinda Dippolito, and I am the Director of Product Management here at Humana. I’m excited to be here today to share with you all our journey with Intradiem, what led us to in automation, how we rolled it out, and the results that we’ve seen so far. A little bit more about me. I’ve been with Humana for over sixteen years. I’ve had the opportunity to work in a variety of roles across the enterprise, including operations, project management, product management, and workforce management. And all of those experiences have really given me an appreciation for the importance of aligning people, processes, and technology to drive meaningful business outcomes. Part of my role involves how we leverage technology to make our contact center operations more efficient while keeping the agent experience front and center. That balance is really what drew us to Intradiem, and it’s really the lens in which I’ll be sharing our story with you all today. Just to give you a little bit of context around the scale in which we’re operating here at Humana, we are one of the largest health care insurance companies within the country. We’re headquartered in Louisville, Kentucky with contact center locations across Kentucky, Florida, and Ohio. We are within the top forty Fortune five hundred companies. Our focus is on simplifying the health care experience and improving health outcomes while reducing the overall cost of care for our members. We face many headwinds today within the health care insurance industry. So finding opportunities to simplify ways of working through automation really play a significant role in our overall focus to simplify while, again, reducing that overall cost of care. At scale, the complexity really compounds quickly. Our agents are handling highly sensitive conversations with members about their health care coverage. These are calls that require precision, empathy, and speed all at once, which really can create operational challenges and really ask the question, how do you maintain quality and efficiency across tens of thousands of employees with workforce types ranging from full time to part time across multiple locations and multiple channels. And that’s really the backdrop for how we started to look at automation. Alright. So the honest answer as to why automation is we really hit the ceiling with our manual processes. As we think about simplifying the health care experience and improving health outcomes while reducing the overall cost of care, we’re really faced with the question of how do we operate more efficiently through automation. We were relying heavily on real time analysts and workforce management teams to provide intraday management, asking them to intervene when associates were out of adherence or when we had unplanned capacity and make decisions in that moment. While they were doing a great job, the volume was just increasing significantly and was growing faster than our headcount could keep up with. At that point, three things became very clear. First, the human factor manual process introduces inconsistency. An alert that one analyst catches, another might miss. The moment you have variability in execution, you have variability in outcomes. And in a contact center, that starts to show up in average handle time, compliance, and customer experience. Second was outdated processes. The tools we were using to manage our real time operations weren’t designed for the pace and scale at which we were operating. We needed something that could act at machine speed. And third, the need for continuous oversight. Our contact center never stops. We have a need to monitor, flag, and respond, and that doesn’t stop at five PM. We needed automation that could keep the pace of operations around the clock. It comes down to having fast, efficient ways to ensure we consistently have the right people in the right place at the right time while unlocking capacity and improving operational efficiencies. So we didn’t approach this as a nice to have. Automation has really become table stakes in our contact center operations, and we saw three dimensions of why that’s true. The first being scalability and efficiency. Our call volumes aren’t shrinking. As we grow, we need systems that can scale with us, not headcount that scales literally and with complexity. We really needed to be able to handle our increasing volume with what we already have, and Intradiem allows us to do just that. The second is innovation. Automation isn’t a onetime deployment. It’s foundational for continuous improvement. As AI and machine learning capabilities grow, having an automation infrastructure already in place means we can layer on more intelligence over time. So we’re continuing to build towards something bigger and not just solving today’s problem. Cost and resource automation is the third one. So this one is tangible. This one, in twenty twenty alone, we saw two point seven million automated actions inside of our contact center. Every one of those actions was a moment where the system acted so a human didn’t have to. That’s real capacity recaptured and real cost avoided. That two point seven million number is something I’ll continue to come back to because it’s really the heartbeat of everything we’re gonna cover in the next few slides. So our partnership with Intradiem started in January of twenty twenty. And one of the things I wanna highlight right up front is how quickly we were able to go from decision to deployment. Full rollout happened in six months. That’s not something small. Many times implementations can drag out and really become disruptions. Intradiem moved fast with us, and we saw in year return. I also wanna remind everyone of the landscape in twenty twenty. We were at the height of the COVID pandemic. We were deploying associates from office contact centers to full work at home. To add to the complexity, we were also migrating from one ACD platform to another, and we’d even moved some associates from one workforce management platform to another. And that transition was seamless with Intradiem. It really solidified our decision and told us a lot about how the solution was built. Five years in, we’re sitting at a seven time return on investment, and that’s not just a projection. That’s really what we’ve measured across the solutions that we’ve deployed. I also wanna give credit to Intradiem and how they’ve partnered with us. Intradiem is not just a vendor that we log tickets with that sit in a backlog for prioritization. They’re truly embedded in our success planning. Our teams work really closely with the success managers to make sure we’re optimizing and not just running. The relationship and partnership that we have with Intradiem has played a key role in our ability to continue to expand. Linda, I just wanted to add our ability to deliver the solution of full deployment in under six months really comes to down to two things. One is the level of effort that’s actually involved with turning on Intradiem. You know, we are a hosted SaaS solution using very, easy to deploy APIs in order to power all the data that flows through our system in real time. So when you consider traditional contact center projects, you know, whether it’s a CCaaS migration or a Salesforce deployment, things that are multiyear journeys, this was a quick win for Humana, especially at that time given the shift of of the remote working environment, rapidly deployable in your payback. But more importantly, why we were able to achieve this is the partnership that we had with your Humana executives cross functionally. The support and having strong executive sponsorship really was what kind of sealed the deal in getting us successful so quickly. So I want to thank you for that. Yes. Thank you, Rachel. It’s important on both sides for sure. Alright. Let’s jump into phase one, and I’ll really be bringing that two point seven million number to life. So phase one is where it all started with two solutions, one being off phone engagement and the other being handle time assistant. Starting with the off phone engagement, the core idea here is simple. Agents are idle between calls, and that’s usually absorbed as shrinkage. Intradiem is able to detect those windows in real time and automatically deliver something productive, things like a training, communication, wellness break, a survey. The agent gets them when they’re actually able to have a moment to receive them and take action and not just according to a schedule that was built before anyone knew how the actual call volume would look that day. What that added up to in twenty twenty five was two hours of unlocked capacity per agent per month. That’s sixteen thousand dynamic work hours, forty five thousand sessions, and the feedback from Teams was clear. General delivery and personalization of the communications landed well, and agents told us that the training deployments throughout the day really helped break up the call handling process in a way that they really appreciated. On the handle time side, Intradiem is monitoring agent states across things like after call work, hold, talk time. And when something is out of target, an alert is automatically triggered to the agent immediately with no supervisor intervention required. I wanna specifically touch on hold time here for a minute. Customers are sitting on hold, and that can negatively impact the customer experience. And being able to automatically prompt an agent during extended hold times without a manager having to catch it is meaningful. That outcome across our teams was a forty five second reduction in average handle time, which is significant at scale. And our real time analysts told us directly that they no longer have to manually chase long calls, extended after call, or nonproductive states. That job is done automatically now. And also from an agent perspective, seventy percent of the agents that we are or associates, I should say, that we surveyed, felt that the amount of Intradiem alerts that they were receiving were appropriate. And here’s the success story that ties it all together. All the automated actions, the two point seven million of them represent work that would have otherwise landed on someone’s plate. For Humana specifically, this level of automation meant we didn’t need to bring on two additional temporary workforce management analysts to handle the volume. That’s real headcount cost avoided. It also means we could redeploy real time agents to more skilled and analytical task. That’s the story behind the number. Then we can look at phase two. So phase two took us a little deeper into the workforce management automation, specifically schedule adherence and attendance management. Two areas that before Intradiem required significant manual oversight. For schedule adherence, Intradiem is monitoring whether agents were being adherent to their schedule. Are they returning from breaks and lunch on time? All of it’s monitored automatically with alerts delivered in real time. What used to be a supervisor watching dashboards and manually following up is now handled automatically. Attendance management takes a similar approach to the front end of the day. No calls, no shows, late logins, unauthorized logins. They’re all flagged automatically before it becomes a bigger operational problem. The outcome of that was a four percent increase in occupancy. That’s agents being in the right place at the right time at higher rates than before. And the agent feedback we got says it best. All the manual things they used to do, they no longer have to, and that’s the exact shift we were looking for. Now on to phase three, which is where we currently are. We’ve got two solutions deployed, including coaching and staffing copilot rollout. On the coaching side, we’re working to launch and optimize the solution for our teams. The goal is simple, coaching that reaches agents faster and more reliable than the current process allows. When coaching happens manually, it’s dependent on a supervisor’s availability, them scheduling, and the actual follow through. Automating the delivery means it happens in real time at that moment with the right content rather than in a scheduled block that may or may not fit the agent’s day. And then for the staffing, we already have the foundation in place, and we’re seeing results with twelve thousand voluntary time off hours generated, which translates directly into overtime avoidance. When you’re able to proactively offer agents the option to go home early during low volume periods, you’re managing that cost without creating a bad associate experience. Right now, we’re working with the team towards Intradiem’s autopilot version of staffing, which will automate even more of that decision making. So what’s next? Where do we go from here? We’ve got three things on the horizon. First, we’re really focused on scaling what’s already working across additional lines of our business. The solutions we’ve deployed in phases one and two have proven their value. Now the work is expanding that to reach even more of our organization, more agents benefiting from the same automation that already exists and is already driving results. Second, we’re looking at deploying more of Intradiem’s contact center automation capabilities that push the boundary of what real time automation can do, things like user productivity tracking, the adaptive handle time, system outage management. Humana has most of Intradiem’s contact or contracted solutions deployed, which means what’s next for us really is about deepening our impact and expanding our scope, not starting over. And third, we’re evaluating Intradiem’s advanced capabilities with Q Optimizer and Back Office Optimizer as we modernize our operations. These tools represent the next layer of intelligent orchestration, connecting the front office and back office in ways that weren’t possible before. Our journey started in twenty twenty. Five years later, we are two point seven million automated actions. We’ve also got a seven times return on our investment, and we’re still building. The Humana Intradiem story, and we’re just getting started. I wanna leave you with this too. While we are two point seven million automated actions with a seven times return on our investment, which is amazing, another thing I briefly want to highlight is, again, our partnership with Intradiem. To me, they’re not just a vendor. They are a true partner invested in our success. Their team is consistently collaborating with us, bringing forward innovative ideas, and working alongside of us to solve challenges that really drive meaningful incomes. It’s clear they’re not simply focused on selling a platform, but on being part of our long long term success story. So thank you all for your time and allowing me to share our Humana Intradiem story. I’m gonna pass it back to, Lizzie and or Rachel. Thank you so much, Melinda. Really enjoyed hearing your journey and having personally been a part of it. We’re just really grateful for the partnership with Humana. You know, a lot of our customers have some sort of BPO footprint as part of their workforces, and it’s absolutely an area that Intradiem does partner with most of our customers on. And we are in some discussions with Humana to expand Intradiem to some of their BPO partners as well. So, you know, as they’re considering their automation journey, you know, that’s eventually what comes to the table because the BPOs really are an extension of their teams, and that’s how they treat them with common tools. So, we can work with our customers on building that specific business case because it might look a little bit different than their internal agents as far as where the, the hard dollar savings are coming from based on contract structure, but something that absolutely that we work with every day in and day out. We do have another minute or so. Is there any other questions that are coming in, Lizzie? No other questions. I did want to mention something that Melinda had in her last slide was a little glimpse into the road map of Intradiem with Q Optimizer and back office optimizer as we really try to connect that front and back office landscape. If you do want to hear more about that, we’re happy to schedule a call with you to go into really what does your back office landscape look like and how can we really help you optimize in back office, front office, or blended environments. Question just came in. What was change management like for the frontline leaders to adjust from manual processes to automation? Yeah. That’s a great question on our side. It is a very easy rollout, I would say. It’s very user friendly. It is not, you know, complex and that it’s it’s easy configurations, and the leaders really appreciate taking that out. A lot of our workforce management teams today are doing kind of that intraday, and so it doesn’t necessarily fall on the frontline leaders. But overall, it is a very positive feedback, and the change management is really around communication and just making sure that they are aware of what’s changing and the alerts that they will be getting. As I shared in the slides too, the feedback we’ve gotten when surveyed is that they feel like the alerts are appropriate and given at appropriate times, and so we’ve gotten a lot of really good feedback from our leaders. But as far as change management, it’s a fairly easy lift. It’s more around just communicating the change and sharing kind of what those alerts will look like for them. Excellent. And our success managers that partner with your organization are certified change management experts. They’ve been through this, with multiple organizations of varying sizes, and really partner with operations with workforce management, and helping to make sure that it’s launching in the appropriate way. They’re getting the content that they need to be as prepared as possible. We have another question in here, Intradiem. Have you experienced any companies who do have both internal and outsourced teams utilizing Intradiem? If so, do the internal and outsourced teams work together with you, or do they work independently with you? Want me to grab that one, Liz? Yes, please. Absolutely. So hi, Carissa. Yes. This is something that’s a common scenario. As mentioned before, most of our customers do have some sort of BPO footprint, and the majority of the time, we work directly with the, with our customers. So let’s just use Humana as the example. We would work directly with Humana on the the contracting in partnership with them with the deployment of the solution with the BPO. So, typically, what we’re finding is that the BPOs are part of the same infrastructure. They’re on the same ACD and WFM platforms, for example, as as the customer. So we work with the customer on the licensing component, but the actual deployment, we work in partnership with the BPO and the customer. And, really, to that’s to help make the the, experience seamless within that same organization regardless if it’s internal or outsourced. Thank you, Gregory, for the great feedback there. Thank you. Alright. Well, thank you so much. If you have any other questions that you haven’t been able to ask, please reach out, and we’re happy to give you a free business assessment as well if you want to explore implementing Intradiem. Alright. What great information. And, Melinda, what a great story you had to tell today. Thank you so much for sharing it with everybody. So I’m gonna be sending out a recording of this. If somebody in your organization did not get here today and you wanna share it with them, you’ll have a link to send to them. Then you’ll be, also receiving, information from Intradiem as well. So thank you so much to Lizzie and to Rachel and Melinda for this great information. We’ll go ahead and close this webinar now, but everybody have a great rest of your day and we’ll see you soon on another webinar. Thank you. Thank you, Vicky.